The San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) hosted the 2nd Annual Research to Practice Conference on March 28th in San Francisco.

By Allen Jones

This year’s conference focused on LGBT Suicide Risk and Prevention. The day-long event held at San Francisco State University was coordinated by, Ryan Ayers, Northern California Area Director for AFSP. He admits there was a smaller number of attendees than last year’s 130. But he was just as excited to hear what those leading the way on research of suicide and prevention had to share.

A good number of AFSP volunteers wearing blue T- Shirts helped get the conference started with registration, food and drink, while a hand full of organizations shared literature on suicide/prevention. But before the conference began, a skim of one AFSP pamphlet dispelled one myth:

Suicides are not more frequent around the December holidays. “In fact, suicide rates tend to be highest in the spring months, peaking in April, and are below average during the winter months, with the lowest rate in December.”

“The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) is the leader in the fight against suicide. We fund research, create educational programs, advocate for public policy, and support survivors of suicide loss. Led by CEO Robert Gebbia and headquartered in New York, AFSP has 67 local chapters with programs and events nationwide.”

Two sad facts:
John R. Blosnich, PhD, Public Health Sciences, Department of Veterans Affairs Pittsburgh, PA, highlighted LGBT mental health issues specifically related to the veteran community, and his research of sexual minority status among U.S. military personnel. He even reminded those in attendance that despite the repeal of “Don’t ask don’t tell” those who would like to serve as transgender cannot serve in the military.

Ilan H. Meyer, Ph.D., a Senior Scholar for Public Policy at the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA’s School of Law, shared current research on suicide attempts and suicide in LGBT individuals in a way that unconfused the confused with his presentation.

Jody L. Herman, Ph.D. Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, provided a landscape overview of the research on suicide among transgender people, including promising interventions. However, she also provided a sobering fact: In the year 2013, there were a little over 16,000 murders in the U.S. There were 41,000 suicides in that same year. Source: CDC

However, some of the information shared only a data nerd could understand. But these leading researchers made it clear to all that, there is still too much that “We do not know.”

There are many warning signs of suicide, which include verbal statements, depression that gets worse, decline in performance at school or work and change in self-care, to name a few. There are also the risk factors that include previous attempts, substance abuse, extreme sensitivity to rejection or failure and isolation.

But too many have experienced what one conference goer described. Debra Anderson said her 82-year-old father in-law committed suicide and not even her husband noticed any signs that he was suicidal. In fact, she said, his nick-name for decades was, “Happy.”

Breakout sessions:
The day’s event broke into several more intimate groups for more educational and sharing on suicide and prevention. San Francisco Suicide Prevention had an impressive young lady who knew her stuff. Sivan Adato, Youth and Outreach Manager spends a good deal of her time in the community schools doing what she knows is her calling. But this weekend she was also educating those at least twice her age on how to detect and help those at risk. She spoke as a seasoned professional, looked like a high school kid but is actually a suicide survivor and counselor.

The Faith community was represented in one breakout session and John leads a Catholic Church LGBT ministry in a San Jose Catholic parish. He told how he in 2003 he attempted suicide by drinking bleach. That attempt got him kicked out of college but when he revealed to his relieved mother that he tried to kill himself because he was homosexual, she then kicked him out of her life. Though to this day, she does not speak to her son, John ironically found a Catholic church that could not be happier to welcome him and the man he eventually married.

Food for thought numbers:
The nation spent $12 billion on AIDS and $2 billion on breast cancer in 2013. It only spent $165 million on suicide prevention at a time when suicide had more deaths than AIDS and breast cancer combined in that year.

San Francisco recorded on average 100 suicide a year; not including those who use the iconic Golden Gate Bridge to end their life. On average there are only 2-3 teens in the city per year who end their life.

Of the 70,000 calls to the San Francisco Suicide Prevention hot line per year, 9 of 10 are related to relationships.

A filling of hope:
The conclusion of the conference included dinner and libations. There was also a survey. On participant filled out his form and turned it in frustrated that he could not find the words that best described what he experienced on the “Comment” line. While mingling with others, it hit him.

He described feeling that we will get the upper hand on reducing the number of suicides by expressing what he wanted to say in the survey that they (presenters) all must have drank from a “fountain of confidence.”

Jay Mulucha, a point guard for the Magic Stormers of Uganda’s women’s basketball league, has encountered discrimination as a transgender athlete. ‘But for us we are lucky to have a team, a basketball team who can help each other out.’ Photo Credit: JP Lawrence

Life as a transgender athlete in Uganda is a dangerous proposition: the heavily Christian country is one of the world’s most homophobic. For Jay Mulucha and Williams Apako, of the Magic Stormers, it’s a reality they have come to terms with together, as a team.

By JP Lawrence

On a black tarmac court in Uganda, Jay Mulucha dribbled the ball between his legs as he surveyed the chaos around him. The 5ft 2in point guard, his eyes up, concentrated on knowing where to be and to what to do, where each player on the court was and where the danger lie. But everything was all wrong. No one seemed to be in the proper place. A whistle blew.

Jay picked up the ball and joined teammate Williams Apako in the huddle as the coach re-explained the play. Jay and Williams are players on the Magic Stormers, a women’s basketball team in the Federation of Uganda Basketball Association (Fuba). Jay and Williams also identify as transgender men in one of the world’s most homophobic countries. And much as we like to think of sports as a refuge, their story is a bit more complicated than that.

Basketball was introduced to Uganda by American Peace Corps volunteers in the sixties. The president of Fuba estimates 1 million of Uganda’s 36 million people play the game. Still, football is the main game in Uganda, with the upstart Fuba league just emerging.

When Jay began playing basketball as a teenager, for example, there was no court at his boarding school. The boys would play on netball pitches at night, and Jay would play among them. “I was the only person born biologically female who liked basketball at that school,” Jay said, “and I was the only one with a ball at that time.”

Jay loved the game because of the teamwork, the dance of the players as they weave and interlock on the court. Each play was a puzzle to be solved. Jay would watch basketball games on DVDs, marveling at Michael Jordan and LeBron James. Further inspiration included his older sister and brother, who played ball in high school league.

But Jay was also grappling with his identity. It was a long process, Jay said, and he struggled alone, until a friend introduced him to Uganda’s LGBT kuchu community. “I got to know I belonged to somewhere and that there were people just like me in this world,” Jay said. “I wasn’t alone.”

This, however, is a dangerous proposition in Uganda. The heavily Christian nation, like many former British African colonies, has long had anti-gay laws, including the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014, known by Western media as the “Kill the Gays bill”. At least 500,000 gay people live in Uganda, according to the BBC, but many Ugandans understand homosexuality only through what they’ve learned from religious leaders.

So when Jay came out in 2010, his family rejected him. Even his older brother and older sister, who had been such an inspiration on the court, turned their backs on him. “Since the whole town found out, wherever I go, people feel threatened when I was in the company of their women,” Jay said, “and even warned me off as if I were some kind of alien.”

Jay found refuge on the court, with the Magic Stormers. There, he met Williams Apako, another queer basketball player. Williams, a 5ft 6in small forward on the team, looked up to not only LeBron James, but transgender heroes like Gabrielle Ludwig and the basketball player Kye Allums.

The two formed a bond on the team, which had other LGBT members on it, people in the kuchu community who could understand and trust each other. “We are being discriminated,” Jay said, “but for us we are lucky at least to have a team, a basketball team who can help each other out.”

But whispers grew about the team. Uganda is a country where tabloids and radio stations publicly out people, and whispers can be dangerous. Whispers, Jay said, led to his firing as a high school referee in 2014. They had told him they suspected him of being gay and favoring a female student. Players on the Magic Stormers wondered if the whispers biased referees and sponsors against them.

But sometimes the discrimination was more obvious. Players on other teams would advise rookies not to join the Magic Stormers, and during games would point at them, call them names. They would say: “Don’t touch me, don’t even come close to me, we don’t want to touch a gay person.”

Jay remembers the urgent phone call he got one night last season. Williams had been assaulted. Jay rushed to the clinic where Williams had been taken. Williams’s eye was gashed and swelling, his arms and legs bruised. And he was crying.

The Magic Stormers had had a game earlier that night. Normally, the Magic Stormers go home after games, but Williams had stayed to watch the remaining games alone. The rowdy crowd began pointing fingers at him, yelling at him, hitting him. “They said, ‘We will rape you, we will teach you how to be a woman,’” Williams said.

After the beating, Williams stayed in treatment for a month. He was scared to come back to the team, back to the sport he loved. Additionally, the 2014 passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act left him without a job. Only after much cajoling did he decide to return to the team.

“Before I was discriminated and segregated,” Williams said, “I used to dream basketball, talk basketball, breath basketball. That’s how much obsessed I was with the sport, until my energies began going down slowly by slowly, due to the nature and setting of sports in my country.”

Jay too spoke to me of the way reality intrudes upon his play. Sometimes when he is stressed, he’ll head out to the court and play. It is a refuge then, its boundaries pushing out the world. “But still, at the end of it all, life goes on, and problems are still there,” Jay said.

Today, Jay and Williams are practicing for another season with the Magic Stormers. Last year, despite all the troubles, they finished third out of 10 teams in the Fuba women’s league, and they hope to improve on that.

However, they hope to make their biggest impact off the court. The two are both advocates of LGBT rights in Uganda, and while the Anti-Homosexuality Act was struck down, a new version is in the works despite the opposition of a lively and growingly outspoken kuchu community. Jay and Williams now hope to help people learn to love themselves, whoever they are.

“I have suffered humiliation right from my time of growth, always referred to as a man in women’s clothing, before I discovered that I was actually trans,” Williams said. “And now I celebrate my identity. I am proud that I am transgender and playing basketball.”

Earl Lloyd, who broke U.S. professional basketball’s color barrier when he became the first African-American to play in the National Basketball Association, died at age 86. The cause of his death was not disclosed.

Lloyd, a Virginia native who lived in Crossville, Tennessee, made sports history when he entered a game for the now-defunct Washington Capitols on October 31, 1950.

The game failed to make any headlines because pro basketball was a young sport in 1950, overshadowed by baseball, golf and college football.

But Lloyd opened the door for thousands of black players to come, including some of the biggest names to ever play any professional sport.

The 1.98 meters tall Lloyd, who was just short of 2 meters tall (about 6 1/2 feet), was drafted into the Army after just seven games with the Capitols. He later played for pro teams in Detroit and Syracuse, New York, and was head coach of the Detroit Pistons from 1971 to 1972.

Charlie Sifford, the first African-American to break the color barrier in professional golf, paving the way for Tiger Woods and other minorities, died Tuesday at the age of 92 in Cleveland, Ohio.

Sifford’s appearance at the 1961 Greater Greensboro Open in his home state of North Carolina marked the first time a black golfer was allowed to play in a tournament sponsored by the Professional Golfers Association of America. He finished in fourth place, despite being harassed and threatened by hostile crowds along the course.

Sifford would go on to win two PGA Tour events in his career, as well as the 1975 Senior PGA Championship, and found himself compared to Jackie Robinson, Major League Baseball’s first black player.

Sifford became the first African-American inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2004, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom last November from President Barack Obama. Obama praised Sifford as a trailblazer “who bent the arc of our nation towards justice.”

Sifford learned the game in his youth while carrying golf clubs for members at whites-only golf courses in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. He would eventually go on to win five national titles on a circuit that allowed black golfers before breaking into the PGA Tour.

Get a evaluation, hydrate, warm up and stretch to help prevent cramping and injuries

The 2015 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is in full swing and with that arises the opportunity to provide helpful injury prevention tips so that “weekend warriors” can enjoy their games to the fullest. For those who, due to work, school or other commitments, usually limit their sports or physical activities to the weekend, playing a game like basketball can result in injury if the proper steps aren’t taken to prepare.

According to James Voos, MD, chief of the Division of Sports Medicine at University Hospitals (UH), head team physician for the Cleveland Browns, and associate professor of orthopaedics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, the essentials for helping players stay healthy are simple: hydrate, warm up/stretch and wear appropriate footwear.

“In addition to spring officially starting in March, the NCAA Tournament (also referred to as “March Madness”) typically gets people excited to get active again after a long, cold winter,” said Dr. Voos. “We like to encourage people to undergo an evaluation with a physical therapist or other health professional from the UH Division of Sports Medicine to help prevent injuries.”

Along with that one-time evaluation, Dr. Voos says that hydration is key to help prevent muscle cramping. He recommends that players up their intake of water or sports drinks two hours before they are scheduled to begin their game and continue to hydrate throughout the game.

Additionally, Dr. Voos stresses that players should take the time to properly warm up and stretch before their games. “I see a lot of Achilles tendon injuries. Often, weekend warriors are sprinting to get their games from work or school and they don’t have time to stretch their muscles.” He continued, “As we get older, we become less resilient.

What may have worked for you when you were younger may unfortunately result in injuries now.” Try this before your next game: Locate a set of steps and then place the balls of your feet on the edge with the rest of your feet hanging over. While hanging onto a handrail or wall for balance, let your heels down. This will stretch your calf muscles and warm up your Achilles tendons.

Lastly, Dr. Voos suggests that weekend warriors ensure that they have the correct footwear for their sport which is also appropriate for the type of surface that they’ll be playing on. “Some players may not be aware that some basketball shoes are made solely for indoor courts, while others are made for outdoor use,” he said. “Check with a knowledgeable salesperson at a sporting goods store or do some research online before investing in an athletic shoe.”

Even after heeding this advice, jammed or sprained fingers, “jumper’s knee” or other injuries can occur. In that case, Dr. Voos recommends icing the affected area and keeping it elevated. If you experience swelling and/or stiffness that doesn’t improve within a day, seek medical attention.

The basketball tournament known as March Madness has grabbed millions of Americans by the collective throat and won’t let go until the last shot. Widely referred to by its nickname because of the month in which the event occurs and the passion it inspires, many Americans consider the NCAA college men’s tournament to be the best sporting experience in the U.S. by a wide mile.

By Tom Turco

Nationwide, workplace productivity drops precipitously during the two-and-a-half-week tournament. Workers watch the games, talk about the brackets, check scores, think about the matchup, and basically goof off when they should be doing their jobs.

These delirious hoop dreams cost about $1.9 billion in lost wages, according to global outplacement and employment firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

That doesn’t even include the distraction March Madness poses to costly higher education as college students ditch their books for the games.

The billions of dollars generated in wagering, advertising and sponsorships prove these fans put their money where their mouths are.

It’s no small wonder. The incredible teamwork and athleticism on display generate a tour de force of American entrepreneurship and ingenuity that makes Apple take note.

It should come as no surprise in a nation that excels at creating lucrative businesses out of … wait for it … nothing.

At the heart of this spiraling contest are the so-called “brackets.” They lay out the game matchups, schedules and locations that start with 68 teams and narrow toward the center, culminating with a championship game between the final two survivors. It’s a thing of beauty, rivaled only by the natural universe and priceless works of art.

The brackets serve as secret sauce that helps to propagate and promote the event, appearing seemingly everywhere, much like locusts. Don’t try to fight it. Even the president of the United States, Barack Obama, has filled out brackets every year he has been in office.

The top seeds in the four regions still remaining in the contest are teams from the University of Kentucky, Duke University and the University of Wisconsin. Villanova University was the fourth, but got upended by North Carolina State University. The tournament can be as surprising and cruel as the weather this month.

The undefeated Wildcats of Kentucky coached by John Calipari are the runaway favorites and the overall number 1 seed. The last team to have a perfect regular season and then run the table in the tourney was the Indiana Hoosiers in 1976.

Can the Wildcats do it? Fans have to watch to find out, which CBS–the American television network televising the entire event–is literally banking on.

A $2-billion chunk of the estimated $9 billion that will be spent on tournament gambling comes from more than 70 million brackets, according to the American Gaming Association.

The group conducted a survey that shows about 40 million people will fill out their winners picks in the brackets, with the average person completing nearly two, and the bet per bracket coming out at $29. The Nevada bookmakers will take in $240 million of that amount.

Half of all March Madness viewers have completed a bracket at least once. C’mon, bet you can’t do just one.

Achieving a perfect bracket is virtually impossible. The odds are even higher than hitting a winning lottery ticket. Last year, famed investor Warren Buffet offered $1 billion to anyone who could come up with one. The Oracle of Omaha knew his money was as safe as the gold in Fort Knox.

It turns out knowledge actually is a dangerous thing in this instance. Yeah, you can over think it. Success in the brackets usually is achieved in inverse proportion to one’s actual knowledge of college hoops.

The outcomes invariably are unpredictable, and David routinely defeats Goliath, but not always. It’s a tricky business.

To pick the winning teams – even though every team in each region is seeded and one could easily take the higher seed – your chances likely are better if you select by favored nicknames, team colors or merely flip a coin.

It’s often the person in the office pool who knows the least that comes out on top. And whoever does win gains serious bragging rights, along with a variable roll of cash.

It’s a taste of pure enterprise, seductive and delicious – as much of a rite of spring as daffodils pushing out of the earth.

The NCAA hauls in a whopping $800 million per year and 90 percent of that comes from the tournament and related licensing deals. The winners and their conferences get a lion’s share of the revenues over the ensuing years.

While that sounds like a stunning amount of bling, just think about all the joy, excitement and spring fever those brackets and the tournament create.

Many little girls like dolls, flowers, butterflies and ponies. A lot of them also like cars, robots, dinosaurs, and spaceships. But most girls clothes only feature the flowers, butterflies and ponies. Two mothers decided to make clothes that reflect all the things that little girls are, and do, and love.

Six-year-old Bella loves to build houses and cars with Lego blocks.

“I like Barbie and also dinosaurs,” said Bella.

So her dress has dinosaurs on it.

“I need a train to put on the train track,” said her friend Penny, who also likes Lego.

“I like to make trucks,” she said.

The four-year old also likes pink and purple, and the dress she is wearing.

Unique because it has a pattern of the mathematical symbol pi. Tramontana says the design opens the door to a conversation about math.

“We haven’t found this type of dress in a store,” she said.

The pi and dinosaur dresses are from a new girl’s clothing line called Princess Awesome. Company co-founder Rebecca Melsky says their dresses feature some designs more typically found on boys’ clothes.

“I think that a girl wearing a dress with science on it. She is telling the world that is something she is interested in. She can love girly things and also love science. It tells that science is just as much for girls as it is for boys,” said Melsky.

It all started two years ago when Melsky was shopping for her 2-year-old, who refused to wear anything but a dress. She bought pajamas mostly from the boys’ section because her daughter also liked robots, trucks and spaceships.

“One day I walked out past the girls’ section of the store, I thought to myself we should make one of those cute dresses that also have a robot on it or a dinosaur because she will wear that. She will love that. Someone should do that. Maybe I should do that,” she said.

Her friend Eva St. Clair agreed she should, and their business was born. Melsky, a school teacher with two children, and St. Clair, a part-time Web developer with four children, got together on Saturdays.

They used fabrics featuring trucks, planes, pirates and atoms. They also created art dresses based on works by Van Gogh and Monet.

“Usually Rebecca and I would be down in my basement. Rebecca would cut and I would stitch. And we got to where we could do about four in an hour,” said St. Clair.

The first batch of 70 dresses sold out at St. Clair’s church bazaar. So the founders took their business online. The dresses sold very well there, too.

“They sold out so fast that we could not make them fast enough. We decided it is time to figure out how to go into a factory,” she said.

So they turned to a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign. They met their goal of $35,000 within days and raised more than $215,000 total in pledges.

“Our biggest challenge is going to be how we expand as rapidly as people seem to want us to,” said St. Clair.

The founders hope Princess Awesome will expand into products for girls of all ages and all interests.

DENVER — A plastic used in filters and tubing has an unusual trait: It can produce electricity when pulled or pressed. This ability has been used in small ways, but now researchers are coaxing fibers of the material to make even more electricity for a wider range of applications from green energy to “artificial muscles.” They will report progress on a novel form of this plastic at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

ACS, the world’s largest scientific society, is holding the meeting here through Thursday. It features nearly 11,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics.

“For the past couple of years, we’ve been doing a lot of work with a material called PVDF — polyvinylidene fluoride,” explains Walter Voit, Ph.D., of the University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas). “If we produce it under precise conditions, we can make it piezoelectric, which means if I stretch it, it generates electricity. Or I can put electricity onto the surface of the material and make it change shape.”

PVDF and other materials with similar traits have already made their way into modern technology in the form of pressure sensors in touchpads and tilt sensors in electronics, for example. But their potential, if their piezoelectric properties get a significant boost, could go far beyond these first-generation applications.

In collaboration with Shashank Priya, Ph.D., at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Voit has already made new progress toward this goal. They have led efforts to develop “soft” polymer-based, energy-harvesting materials as part of the Center for Energy Harvesting Materials and Systems, a National Science Foundation (NSF) program focused on the development of energy-capture and motion-control technologies.

Cary Baur, a doctoral student in Voit’s lab, has figured out a way to incorporate organic nanostructures known as “buckyballs” and single-walled carbon nanotubes into PVDF fibers to double its piezoelectric performance. Buckyballs are tiny spheres made out of carbon atoms. They and their cylindrical relatives have interesting properties that scientists are harnessing in a variety of ways.

In the case of Voit’s materials, the carbon nanostructures even out and increase the overall strength of the electrical field. As a result, the PVDF-carbon hybrids are the best piezoelectric composites that have been reported to date in the scientific literature, Voit says.

To turn these yarn-like structures into artificial muscles — a catch-all name for materials that can contract or relax in response to an electric current or temperature — Voit needs to make them more powerful. One approach for accomplishing this was developed by a UT Dallas colleague. Ray Baughman, Ph.D., took a bundle of nylon fibers about the width of ten strands of human hair and wound them into a long, tight coil, just like an old-fashioned telephone cord but on a much smaller scale. That structure could contract by nearly 50 percent when heated and lift about 16 pounds.

“The effect is similar to twisting a rubber band,” Voit says. “If you pull on it when it’s coiled, you get a lot more strain on the rubber band than if it’s just straight.”

Voit is looking to create a similar effect for his PVDF-carbon fibers, which are far better piezoelectric materials than nylon and would contract in response to an electric current. “We have to coil it,” he says. “We have to have the right piezoelectric properties after it’s in that complex shape. That’s the real secret sauce that we think we can pull off. Ultimately, it could be used to build synthetic muscles that could make prosthetic limbs more life-like.”

Another potential use for Voit’s materials that has attracted commercial interest is for energy harvesting, he says. Boeing, which funded some of his research, is interested in using the energy generated from airplane passengers as they sit, get up and adjust in their seats to power some of the plane’s functions such as overhead lights in cabins. Voit says this would allow the airline to eliminate some cables, which can add significantly to the weight of their jets, and save on fuel.
“Now we’re finding ways to make this more processable at larger scales to enable larger energy harvesting apparatuses and practical artificial muscles,” Voit says.

In addition to the Boeing funding, Voit also received financial support for this work from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, UT Dallas, NSF and Texas Instruments.

ATLANTA—Medication used to treat patients with type II diabetes activates sensors on brain cells that increase hunger, causing people taking this drug to gain more body fat, according to researchers at Georgia State University, Oregon Health and Science University, Georgia Regents University and Charlie Norwood Veterans Administration Medical Center.

The study, published on March 18 in The Journal of Neuroscience, describes a new way to affect hunger in the brain and helps to explain why people taking a class of drugs for type II diabetes gain more body fat.

Type II diabetes, the most common form of diabetes, affects 95 percent of diabetes sufferers. People with type I or type II diabetes have too much glucose, or sugar, in their blood. Type II diabetes develops most often in middle-aged and older adults and people who are overweight and inactive, according to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

The research team found that sensors in the brain that detect free circulating energy and help use sugars are located on brain cells that control eating behavior. This is important because many people with type II diabetes are taking antidiabetics, known as thiazolidinediones (TZDs), which specifically activate these sensors, said Johnny Garretson, study author and doctoral student in the Neuroscience Institute and Center for Obesity Reversal at Georgia State.

The study found peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor ϒ (PPARϒ) sensors on hunger-stimulating cells, known as agouti-related protein (AgRP) cells, at the base of the brain in the hypothalamus. Activating these PPARϒ sensors triggers food hoarding, food intake and the production of more AgRP. When AgRP cells are activated, animals become immediately hungry. These cells are so potent they will wake a rodent up from slumber to go eat, Garretson said.

TZDs help to treat insulin resistance, in which the body doesn’t use insulin the way that it should. They help the body’s insulin work properly, making blood glucose levels stay on target and allowing cells to get the energy they need, according to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

“People taking these TZDs are hungrier, and they do gain more weight. This may be a reason why,” Garretson said. “When they’re taking these drugs, it’s activating these receptors, which we believe are controlling feeding through this mechanism that we found. We discovered that activating these receptors makes our rodent animal model eat more and store more food for later, while blocking these receptors makes them eat less and store less food for later, even after they’ve been food deprived and they’re at their hungriest.”

The research team includes Dr. Timothy Bartness, director of the Center for Obesity Reversal at Georgia State; Johnny Garretson and Drs. Brett J. W. Teubner and Vitaly Ryu of Georgia State; Dr. Kevin L. Grove of Oregon Health and Science University; and Dr. Almira Vazdarjanova of Georgia Regents. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.

Study led by UCLA doctor finds t-cell level returns to normal with time

Los Angeles – Most children with HIV who have low levels of a key immune cell eventually recover levels of this cell after they begin treatment, according to a new study conducted by researchers at UCLA and other institutions in the U.S. and Brazil. The researchers were funded by the National Institutes of Health.

“We were pleased to find that the vast majority of children experience immune system recovery with effective therapy,” said Dr. Paul Krogstad, professor of pediatric infectious diseases and of molecular and medical pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and the study’s first author. “Our study also provided the most detailed information to date about the timing of this recovery in school-age children.”

Krogstad is also a member of the UCLA AIDS Institute and Center for AIDS Research.
CD4+ t cells are a major target of HIV. In about 15 percent of adult patients, the cells fail to rebound after the virus has been suppressed with medication, a scenario that is associated with life-threatening illnesses.

The new study, which was published online in the journal AIDS, was intended to determine to what extent children who were infected with HIV around the time of birth were at risk for this condition and whether this failure carried with it a major risk for serious infection.

The failure of CD4+ t cells to rebound occurs only infrequently in young children with HIV, said Rohan Hazra, a study author and the chief of the maternal and pediatric infectious disease branch at the NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which provided much of the funding for the study.

“The comparatively few children whose CD4+ cells failed to rebound did not appear to be at any greater risk for serious infection than children with higher CD4+ counts,” he said.

Hazra added that the findings do not appear to change treatment recommendations for children with HIV: antiretroviral treatment to suppress the virus and periodic follow-up examinations to detect the first signs of any serious infections.

To conduct their analysis, researchers reviewed data from three research networks caring for more than 3,700 children in the U.S., Central and South America, and the Caribbean who were infected with HIV before or during birth. The researchers followed the CD4+ cell counts of 933 children who were at least 5 years old when they started anti-HIV treatment. Healthy CD4+ cell counts range from 500 to 1,200 cells per blood sample. Fewer than 500 cells per sample is considered low, and 200 or fewer per sample is considered very low. After one year of anti-HIV treatment, 86 percent of children in the study achieved CD4+ counts of 500 or more. After two years of anti-HIV treatment, 92 percent surpassed this threshold.

The researchers also reviewed the children’s records for signs of serious illness during the course of their treatment. Known as CDC Category C events, these illnesses are a sign of the seriously weakened immune system in people with AIDS. A total of nine children experienced such events. The occurrence of these events did not differ statistically between those having CD4+ cell counts below 500 at the time of the event (four children) and those with counts above 500 (five children).

The study authors noted that compared to adults with low CD4+ counts at the beginning of treatment, CD4+ counts in children increase to 500 or more with time after treatment has begun. Yet, despite such increases, some children had Category C conditions or other significant illnesses during the first three years of HIV treatment. The researchers wrote that additional studies are needed to understand this higher risk of illness.

Additional funding was provided by several NIH institutes: the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Office of AIDS Research, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.